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Westminster Abbey, Scaling Up

A choir procession in Westminster Abbey, where the marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton will take place on Friday.Credit
Dan Kitwood/Agence France-Presse Via Getty Images

LONDON

ON an average early morning at Westminster Abbey, two worlds collide: the secular and the spiritual, albeit with an ancient doorway in between.

Around the cloister, tourists stand in line, checking their cameras and their ticket money as they wait to shuffle into one of London’s must-see destinations. Close by but unknown to them, behind the door, 24 small boys stand in the abbey choir school around a grand piano, rehearsing music they will sing not for tourists but for God.

The heavy door muffles sound. A good thing, because the music is a secret that the boys are honor-bound not to reveal to anyone, not even their parents. Misplaced trust? Perhaps, but these are not ordinary boys. They are Westminster Abbey choristers: heirs to a great tradition, impeccably trained, ridiculously mature and about to get the experience of their young lives, singing at the wedding of a future king of England.

“They know the drill,” said the man at the piano, the abbey organist and music director, James O’Donnell. “They know what’s expected of them. Details of the wedding service are embargoed by the royal household, so we’re not allowed to say anything. And we don’t.”

Making a state secret of a music list may sound absurd, but it’s the protocol that goes with something like the marriage of Prince William to his college sweetheart, Kate Middleton. When the ceremony takes place on Friday, it will bring much of Britain to a standstill. (The day has been declared a national holiday.) It will create a new social divide between those who have and have not been invited to the abbey. And among the have-nots, it is expected to draw a television audience of billions worldwide. All of which places a heavy burden on the abbey personnel responsible for what takes place.

Chief among them is the dean, the Rev. Dr. John Hall. Dr. Hall presides over the abbey’s affairs and runs its resident community of six priests and attendant laity who live in the abbey cloisters: a gated enclave in the heart of London but miraculously separate from the noise, the bustle and the tourists that engulf it.

The regimen is monastic, maintaining a link with the abbey’s origins as a Benedictine community founded in A.D. 960 and based on a daily routine of prayer, praise and music. In 1540, when the Westminster Benedictines were closed down, the routine lapsed. But it thrives again.

“We have four services here a day, five on Sundays, many of them sung,” Dr. Hall said recently. “So 450 years after we ceased to be Benedictine, we maintain the heritage in that daily round of prayer, and it’s the most important thing we do.”

Another Benedictine heritage the abbey maintains is that of hospitality, though the guests these days are paying ones, with cameras. “It costs £11 million a year” — $18 million — “to keep the abbey going,” Dr. Hall said, “and because of our strange status, we get no funding from the Church of England or government. So that leaves the tourists. And we hope that beyond just being tourists, they’ll find here an experience of God. That’s our intention.”

But it’s the strange status of Westminster Abbey that governs its most famous function, as a national shrine to house great state events. The abbey rejoices in the title “royal peculiar,” which means it is neither a parish church nor a cathedral, and answerable only to the sovereign. Its clergy are appointed by the crown (through 10 Downing Street) and have uncommon access to the power brokers in British society.

Coronations have taken place in the abbey since William the Conqueror’s, in 1066, royal weddings since 1100. And royal funerals have followed suit, as with those of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

If these grand events have anything in common, it’s that every time one comes along, it turns the abbey upside down. Coronations are traditionally the biggest tasks; they last for hours, involve armies of participants and require a major refitting of the building to triple its capacity.

For the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, the abbey was closed for seven months while tiered seating was built for the great and good who had to be accommodated. Belted earls and marquesses were packed in like sardines, with no thought for health or safety. And the choirboys had their cassock pockets stuffed with sticks of barley sugar to help them get through the day.

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But a coronation allows plenty of time to prepare; a funeral does not. And while the death of the 101-year-old queen mother was long expected (with periodic practice runs for her send-off undertaken secretly), the death of Princess Diana was not.

“She died on 31 August,” said Martin Neary, who was the abbey organist at the time. “The funeral was 6 September, and no one was expecting it. The choristers were on their summer holidays. We had to fly them back from wherever they were in the world, and there was very little time to organize something we knew would attract global attention. In the circumstances, I think we did rather well.”

Indeed, thanks to some unconventional but effective repertory decisions, Diana’s funeral became the most potent platform for church music in living memory. Two billion people saw the coffin carried down the nave to the accompaniment of John Tavener’s “Song for Athene,” which was then absorbed into the myth of the event. More controversial was Elton John singing “Candle in the Wind,” which caused intakes of breath within the British establishment. But it had Mr. Neary’s blessing, he said. “I thought that if we didn’t have something like Elton John, it might happen anyway, with some alternative Diana service taking place elsewhere,” he added. “Many of us at the abbey felt that.”

Photo

James O'Donnell, the abbey organist and music director.Credit
Dean and Chapter of Westminster

Mr. John’s hasn’t been the only solo turn in latter-day royal ceremonies. At Diana’s wedding to Prince Charles in 1981 (which was not at the abbey but at St. Paul’s Cathedral), there was a spotlighted moment for Kiri Te Kanawa, who sang “Let the Bright Seraphim” from Handel’s “Samson” in a memorable hat and earned herself a damehood as a result. Prince Andrew’s marriage to Sarah Ferguson featured the soprano Arleen Augér; Princess Margaret’s memorial service, Felicity Lott and Bryn Terfel.

This tendency to pull in stars — tactfully briefed not to upstage the coffin or the couple, as the case may be — has fueled speculation that Prince William’s wedding will headline someone from the pop charts: maybe Mr. John again, for old times’ sake. But the likelihood that William would want to be reminded of his mother’s funeral was always slim. And despite the circumspection of the abbey staff, it is clear that nothing of the sort is in the cards. In talks with the dean and the precentor, the priest responsible for liturgical planning, the persistent watchword was dignity: a factor not as prominent in historic royal occasions as you might expect.

Eighteenth-century coronations were like soccer matches: people ate, drank and were not particularly decorous. George IV locked out his wife, whom he was trying to divorce at the time, leaving her to run around the abbey precincts battering on doors. And the abbey library holds fascinating records of how staff members across the centuries (especially the musicians) made money on the side, selling space in the organ loft to rich spectators. Mr. O’Donnell’s most celebrated predecessor in office, Henry Purcell, was found guilty of this lucrative offense and forced to pay the money back or face dismissal.

But the library also testifies to the pains abbey musicians have taken to do their duty and get the music right for great royal occasions. A shelf of unassuming cardboard boxes contains correspondence relating to the music list for the 1953 coronation, which involved every composer of note in the British Empire and got out of hand (as the organist at the time discovered to his horror). So much had been commissioned that he had to claw back, and his initial efforts to offload lesser figures from the dominions (notably the Canadian composer Healey Willan) caused diplomatic rows.

Music at a royal abbey occasion can’t help having a significance. For future generations it will stand as evidence of past taste. For contemporary church musicians it’s a stroke of luck: a chance to ride a moment when their culture — these days, relatively marginal in public consciousness — acquires a sudden spotlight.

Mr. O’Donnell doesn’t see himself as marginal, and with arguably the top job in the world of church music, he has a point. He makes successful recordings, he tours internationally, and he thinks the rise of period performance has brought him and his kind closer into the mainstream of commercial music-making. “Secular choirs like the Tallis Scholars and the Sixteen have given visibility to the music we do day in, day out liturgically, and that brings us into the fold. Listeners can buy their CDs or ours, and sometimes they prefer ours. So we are there, being heard.”

But he doesn’t often get the chance to be heard on Friday’s scale. And immersed in protocol and secrets, he is finding these last days of preparation tough. Choosing his words, he wouldn’t admit to rising tension but accepted that “there’s a lot of adrenalin around,” not least in relation to the vocal health of his choristers.

Ranging in age from 8 to 13, they enjoy the privileges of an elite education, attending a school with only 34 pupils and 9 teachers. In return they shoulder the workload of professionals. Nerves fray, voices break. Check that: “We don’t say ‘break’ here, we say ‘change,’ ” Mr. O’Donnell said. “It sounds less rupturing.”

The hopes and daily prayers of people at the abbey are that there will be no “changes” in the next five days, no whispered secrets and no media-wise tourists listening too intently at the cloister door.

A version of this article appears in print on April 24, 2011, on Page AR20 of the New York edition with the headline: Westminster Abbey, Scaling Up. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe